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Thursday, 25 October 2012

Agony and redress for molestation & rape of women in Haryana

Haryana rocked by rapesTime for social reform movement
by D.R. Chaudhry

A large number of rape cases in
Haryana in the recent past have rocked the state. Since September 9,
when a Dalit girl in a village in Hissar district was gang-raped, as
many as 21 rape cases have occurred in the state.

As
stressed editorially in The Tribune (October 10), “Instead of hiding
behind some data, the callous bureaucrats should read the fine print
behind crimes against women and treat them with sensitivity.” It further
emphasises the point (October 11) by pointing out that “you will find
the entire discourse of the state and the law and order machinery
revolving around seeking justification for such crimes…When such
insensitivity exists among those who are supposed to take care of the
vulnerable sections of society, it explains why crime against women
continues to be on the rise.”It
is an open secret that the law-enforcing agencies in Haryana have
become dysfunctional and are amenable to all kinds of socio-political
pressures and economic allurements. One cannot expect speedy action from
this decrepit structure against criminals. This understanding drove
the father of a girl, a victim of gang-rape in Hissar district, and a
similarly placed girl in Jind district to commit suicide.

The quality of the administrative structure in
Haryana, undoubtedly, has contributed to the menace of mass
rapes in the state. However, its roots are deeper and the problem needs
sociological analysis to grasp the essence of the phenomenon. Haryana is
a male-dominated society with strong patriarchal structures. Woman has
always been treated as an inferior creature here. The common male
perception about women in Haryana’s rural hinterland is very painful.
There are many adages denigrating woman popular in the folklore in the
state. If a woman tries to argue to stress her individuality she is
dubbed as one whose “sir phir gaya
hai” (her mind has gone astray). The male often says, “Jo
jiada bolti hai wohi pitati hai (the one who speaks too much gets beaten
up).

The highly skewed sex
ratio in Haryana is an important contributory factor. Haryana’s record
in this respect is the worst not only in India but also in the whole
world. Even Sub-Saharan African countries often afflicted with civil
war, epidemics and famine have a better record than
Haryana. According to the 2011 census, the child sex ratio in
Haryana is 830 girls for 1,000 boys. Many a youth has to bear the curse
of chronic bachelorhood. In every big village in Haryana there are
several hundred young men with no prospect of getting married. To meet
this deficit the girls are bought from distant places and sold in
Haryana. They are mere commodities to satiate male lust.Unemployment
has further added woes to the youths. The failure of law and order
machinery, the pain of bachelorhood and unemployment make a lethal
cocktail which has thrown up a large number of lumens in society for
whom crime is a major occupation, especially with regard to women. Some
khap leaders in Haryana have suggested a novel solution to deal with the
problem. Lower the age of marriage and the problem would disappear. The
suggestion is bizarre, to say the least. A six-year-old girl was
gang-raped in Gurgaon recently. Should the girls aged six be married
off?

A good number of the
girls raped so far are teen-agers. There are instances of married women
raped by married men. In Kaithal district, a five-month pregnant woman
was raped by two men. In the Hissar rape case, four of the rapists are
married. Early marriage involves the risk of early childbirth which
causes death of many such mothers, according to the Human Rights Watch. The
khap panchayats claim to be the custodians of social morality. On the
slightest deviation from the marital norms set by them, they have been
organising the social boycott of families and often creating mass frenzy
resulting in the cases of honour killings. Why don’t they apply the
same standard to deal with rapists in the state? By following their
logic, they should have banned the entry of the rapists in their
respective villages and approached their families to disown them,
failing which such families should have been
ostracised.

The
argument of lowering the marriageable age on grounds of girls reaching
the biological age at 15 or 16 tends to put the blame on the girls for
their rape. On reaching the biological age they are supposed to invite
the male for fornication which later on is passed off as rape. One
Congress leader has lent weight to this argument by suggesting that 90
per cent rapes in the state are consensual.

This
worldview is in tune with the recent decision of some khap panchayats
in western UP prohibiting girls from using mobile phones, wearing jeans,
going to market alone, etc. Lowering the marriage age would deprive the
girls of higher education and jobs. This is what the khaps want, to
make the girls galley slaves in the four walls of their houses.A
holistic approach is needed to tackle the problem in its totality. The
present development model based on GDP,
FDI, etc, and building some industrial hubs which are fast
becoming unmanageable monstrous habitats — Gurgaon provides an apt
illustration — leaving the bulk of the population languishing in poverty
and squalor has to be given up. The crisis in agriculture has to be
tackled to make small landholding so viable as to provide occupation to a
family’s youths by diversifying it through setting up cottage and
agro-industries and promoting dairy and animal husbandry and other
agriculture-related activities.

Unfortunately,
the state is depriving peasants of their traditional occupation without
providing any alternative, especially in the NCR region. Peasants in
this region these days can be heard complaining: “Sarkar hamare khood
bikwane par tuli huai
hai” (the government is bent upon selling off our land.) The
nexus involving land speculators, builders and property dealers on the
one hand and our political and bureaucratic elite on the other is too
evident now to need elaboration. This would prove ruinous in times to
come.

The law and order
agencies must be whipped to shed off their complacence and corrupt
practices. Over and above all this, the problem relates to civil
society, which is at present fragile in the state. Haryana needs a
powerful social reform movement to confront and overturn its patriarchal
structures. This is a challenge to all those who are genuinely worried
at the present state of affairs in the state.(Accessed from www.tribuneindia.com on 25 Oct. 2012 at 1420 hrs.)____________________________________

In response to above article the following response was sent to The Tribune via e-mail for consideration of publication but it seems to have been rejected. Hence its reproduction here for kind perusal by friends and followers:

Molestation of women preventable

only through emancipation

I
couldn’t have expected Prof. D.R.Chaudhry to be as non-descript and
inconspicuous in building tangible arguments followed by lack of
effective and feasible solutions than in his article (Haryana rocked by
rapes –time for social reform movement, in The Tribune, Oct.19, 2012).
Instead of fetching socially feasible plans, the article has atoned
itself as another piece of accusation on political and administrative
machinery and attempts to singularly holding deficient governance to
intervene into intangible matters. Does Prof Chaudhry mean that the
political masters should start harshly intervening into the intangible
lives of the people through the ‘brutish’ police force and ‘insensitive’
district officers? Are these professional bodies so naïve as couldn’t
see the design of a ‘rapist’ or his accomplice in addition to reading
the mindset of those that may commit a ‘honor killing’ sometime in the
future. Culling news items from daily papers and compiling only those
facts, figures and responses in a selective and purposeful manner as
could enable an author to easily advance his point of view is the job of
novices and not of person having the status of Prof Chaudhry. One
cannot take Folklore as an express statement about the status of women
in Haryana, in perpetual submission and secondary to masculinity. With
education and good teachers we could have transformed the male attitude
and status of womanhood in Haryana. Regularly putting Haryana into
awful light on grounds of rapidly occurring incidents of rape, honor
killing, land scams, deficiency of governance looks as if the
media-scanner is more forceful than the individual culturing and
enhancement in so many other sectors such as sports, IT, teaching,
health, apparel designing, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, nutrition,
automobiles and marketing. If our women remain uneducated, unhealthy,
physically weak, confined to homes and timid good governance and even a
vigil police cannot prevent rapes and honor killings. And, never through
Prof Chaudhry’s assailing suggestions, I feel. As preventive medicine,
our socially relevant interventional strategies have to be planned
through brainstorming sessions by social activists, high profile
teachers and professional, which could be implemented with full steam
for a period of at least two decades through the joint mechanism put in
place by Khaps, Universities, NGOs and the media. We have the Bibipur
model before us that need to be streamlined and pursued with vigor for
better results. By the way, are we really interested in framing a policy
for woman’s emancipation?

About Me

I am a cultural historian and looking for dedicated friends who work in documenting the cultural heritage of India both tangible and intangible. I am life member of INTACH, Science writer, author, contributor, frequent traveller, photographer, lecturer, friendly, sharp minded, caring and physically robust. Likes simple, traditional Indian food and company of young, energetic and absultely nationalistic people.